Witnesses for the Defence Testimonies concerning Shostakovich's attitudes to the
Soviet regime by Ian
MacDonald

I: Fear and
Resistance

During the Rumanian revolution of 1989, the BBC's John Simpson reported
that, as people left their houses to join the crowds flooding through
the streets of Bucharest, the most overwhelming impression to strike the
senses of Western onlookers was the smell of shit. Their nervous systems
conditioned by thirty years of state terror, the marchers, even as they
advanced to cast down a dictator, were soiling their pants in mortal
fear. In 1991, press reports of Saddam Hussein's "torture palaces"
provided more than enough data to account for the Rumanian phenomenon,
and no doubt the same stench pervaded the streets of Basra and Kirkuk
during the abortive Shi'ite and Kurdish uprisings in March of that year.
"The new Hitler" was what Western journalists and democratic politicians
were then calling the author of those horrors; yet, as with Ceausescu, a
more accurate comparison for Saddam is not Hitler - who, notwithstanding
the Holocaust, mostly slaughtered foreigners - but Stalin, whose
gigantically larger toll of human life was taken almost entirely from
his own people.

"Death to the Russians!" was, claimed Stalin's Politburo crony Anastas
Mikoyan, the brooding Georgian's customary toast during the late
Forties. How many deaths did the old monster chalk up in pursuit of this
edifying philosophy? About fifty million, hazards Zenon Poznyak, leader
of the Byelorussian Popular Front and excavator of the Stalin era
mass-graves found at Kuropaty in 1988. Poznyak's guess (in line with
those of Nedelya's Igor Bestuzhevlada[1] and Ogonyok's Vitaly Vitaliev[2]) appears in The New Russians
(1990) by Hedrick Smith, a reporter who won a Pulitzer for his work as
Moscow correspondent of The New York Times during the Seventies. Such
claims of vast numbers of deaths under Stalin are inevitably
controversial and some Western scholars have proposed figures between a
tenth[3] and a hundredth as high.[4] These low estimates, though, depend on
falsified census figures and KGB statistics compiled in the 1960s which
have recently been dismissed as cosmetic by no less an authority than
the current head of the secret police ministry archives. The struggle
among Western scholars over the internal death-rate under Soviet
Communism continues.[5] Meanwhile Russian
researchers, still discovering unsuspected mass-graves, have yet to
arrive at anything approaching a dependable final figure. (Galina
Klokova, one of several teams of historians rewriting Soviet history
textbooks, has grimly observed[6] that "even
forty million may be short of the mark", implying that such an estimate
would exclude, among others, the victims of the Civil War, now generally
agreed to have been fomented by Lenin in order to consolidate power.[7])

State-created death on a scale indicated by figures like these is
impossible to imagine; the mind, reeling before such enormity, gives up
trying to grasp it, turning instead to things more easily comprehended
in size and rationale. Yet even if the volume of "excess mortality"
under Soviet Communism is beyond our power to conceive, we can surely at
least begin to understand the fear which this phenomenon must have
disseminated - indeed was intended to disseminate - throughout the
society upon which it was imposed. Supposing, for example, that, during
a period of many years in which our media harped on the necessity of
maintaining "vigilance" against spies and renegades, one person from
every twenty households in our land was arrested and subsequently
disappeared? Such a frightful state of affairs - similar to the vision
of a totalitarian Britain invoked by George Orwell in his black satire
on Stalinism, Nineteen Eighty-Four - would clearly cause a
profound upheaval in the national psyche, spreading fear so intense that
most people would avoid or deny opinions inimical to the regime and
betray even their closest relatives in order not to be taken away to the
torture chambers[8] or death camps.

This is
precisely what happened in Stalin's Russia and we now have a colossal
amount of written testimony from those who were victims of Stalinist
terror as to what, in fact and experience, it was like. To begin to
discover this literature and the extraordinary, almost insane, reality
which inspired it, Westerners have merely to visit their local
libraries, pick up books like Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag
Archipelago, Roy Medvedev's Let History Judge, Eugenia
Ginzburg's Into the Whirlwind, Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope
Against Hope, or Robert Conquest's The Great Terror, read
them attentively, and follow the references supplied in their
bibliographies. They will find a terrible consistency to the hundreds of
individual testimonies retailed in these books - and, through
encountering what amounts to the same personal story related over and
over again in different voices and from different perspectives, they
will acquire a three-dimensional grasp of life under the Soviet regime
which, apart from its inherent benefits in conferring a deeper
understanding of the 20th century, will open their ears in ways they may
not expect to the nuances of meaning and expression in the best music of
Shostakovich.

While it is obviously impossible to distill this enormous, multitudinous
story into a single life, something of the sort is required here since
most of those reading this will not have read the five books listed
above and will therefore be somewhat at a loss as to what is being
proposed. Let us, then, take "for example" the life of the former Soviet
film star Tatiana Okunyevskaya, born in Saratov in 1915. Tata, as she is
known to her friends, now lives in a one-room cooperative apartment in
Moscow with access to a decrepit summer-house on the edge of the city
acquired for her by Memorial, the organisation dedicated to the rights,
well-being, and commemoration of victims of Stalinism. This house, she
told writer Jo Durden-Smith, once belonged to a scientist shot during
Stalin's purge of Jewish doctors in 1953. Okunyevskaya has recently
published her memoirs and, taking this as an opportunity, Durden-Smith
interviewed her for The Sunday Telegraph, from which article[9] the following facts are taken.

Like
Shostakovich, Tata lost her father in her teens. Kyril Okunyevsky, along
with Tata's grandmother, was among hundreds of thousands shot at the
peak of the Terror in 1937. Memorial traced their remains to a mass
grave at Butovo near Moscow and arranged for Tata to examine her
father's file in the Lubianka. The final entry states: "Arrested 26th
August 1937; 6th October, shot with no investigation." Tata discovered
that her grandmother had been shot five days later. "There wasn't any
room," she explains. "Stalin said: 'Smash all the intelligentsia.' And
there just wasn't room for them all in the Lubianka."[10] Her father had been denounced by several
of his neighbours, including an old alcoholic who used to sing lullabies
to her daughter, Inga. Later, Tata would be denounced to Stalin by her
second husband.

Such betrayals, which rarely had any substantial basis, were intrinsic
to Soviet life - institutionalised by state terror and coerced out of
people by secret police agents and informers (although many denouncers
acted without immediate duress so as to gain social advantages, such as
the denounced one's post at work or his or her room in the communal
flat). The late Sir Isaiah Berlin, who served as a diplomat in Moscow
after the war and famously met the poetess Anna Akhmatova in November
1945, recalled of Stalin's USSR: "It was the most frightful regime I
have ever lived under. Nobody knew who was friend and who was foe."[11] Under such circumstances, few of the
normal bonds of human relationship remained intact. Of her Soviet
rulers, Tata Okunyevskaya told Durden-Smith: "They were beasts. They
killed everything: family, love, trust, loyalty. But I've outlived them;
I'm a witness. And I'm so old that I can remember decent people!"

After
being raped twice by Lavrenti Beria, the head of the NKVD, Tata was
eventually arrested in 1948 and incarcerated for a year in the Lubianka.
She found that her interrogators, following standard secret police
practice, "knew everything" about her life in immense detail: her
conversations, her parties, the remarks she had risked, believing
herself to be among friends (such as, referring to Stalin's cult, "Not
even Nicholas II put up such big statues to himself"). Charged with
espionage, betraying the motherland, wanting to escape abroad, and
anti-Soviet agitation, she was found guilty of saying Soviet songs were
awful and for anti-Soviet conversations. For these crimes, she was
awarded the statutory ten years hard labour in the Gulag.

Sent to a
brick-making camp in Kazakhstan, Tata rashly wrote a letter of complaint
to Stalin, for which she received 14 months' solitary confinement and a
return visit to the Lubianka where Beria's deputy Viktor Abakumov
informed her that she would die like a dog. She was despatched back into
the Gulag, this time to a logging camp in the Arctic circle where most
prisoners soon perished. She, though, survived, finally being released
in 1954 after Khrushchev's accession. Every veteran of the Gulag seems
to have had an epiphanal moment and Tatyana Okunyevskaya's happened at
the Sverdlovsk transit camp, through which every prisoner passed. "I
was," she recalls, "very sick with a raging fever, lying on a stretcher
on the ground. There was a wire fence, with women on one side and men on
the other; and suddenly I looked up through the wire and saw my first
love, a boy I'd grown up with and played games with, for kisses. He saw
me too. 'Tatushka! Tatushka!' he said, putting his face right up against
the fence. It was the last I ever saw of him."

Although few Soviet citizens had the displeasure of knowing Stalin
personally, life stories like Okunyevskaya's are legion in the
still-shattered domain of the former USSR, and ubiquitous in the epic
literature of memoirs and histories of that time and place (into which
world the five books mentioned above are merely the most imposing
gateways). The dominant note in such narratives, tolling insistently
like a funeral bell behind every experience and every sensation, is that
of fear - paralysing, all-pervading fear. Nadezhda Mandelstam writes
with engrossing eloquence of the intense fear she and Akhmatova felt at
certain periods during Stalin's purges - a fear that made physical
movement difficult, tapered voices down to shivering whispers, and
turned nights into hypersensitive vigils feverish with the anticipation
of arrest. Fear is likewise the subject of their mutual friend Lydia
Chukovskaya's novel of the time of the Terror Sofya Petrovna, as
it is the title both of a contemporary play by Alexander Afinogenov and
of the sequel to Anatoli Rybakov's novel of Soviet life in the Thirties,
Children of the Arbat.[12]

Not only
did the Soviet regime deliberately inspire fear of its agencies as a
means of social control,[13] but it also
fomented fear of the outside world so as to motivate efforts of national
will - such as the Five-Year Plans - and drummed up fear of so-called
"alien" elements within the USSR - such as "wreckers", "spies",
"Trotskyites", "counter-revolutionaries", minor racial groups known as
"nationalities", and in particular Soviet Jews - in order to muster
support for purges expedient to the machinations of Stalin and the crew
of self-cannibalising human sewer-rats referred to in Pravdaas
his politburo. Apart from anything else, this institutionalised fear
worked, hand in hand with the transparent falsehoods disseminated in
government propaganda, to destroy any notion of dependable truth. Hence
rumour had to stand in for reliable news, while the inadvisability of
speaking plainly in public - and often at home, especially in front of
one's children - caused a boom in "Aesopian" discourse, whereby what a
person said in so many words was often to be interpreted euphemistically
or even in precisely the opposite sense.

Fear, then, was a constant
factor in Soviet life, albeit that the intensity of its effects varied
from period to period and also between different segments of the
populace. During the times of severely applied state terror in 1935-1939
and 1948-53, fear was generally felt across all social groupings, though
invariably with more than average intensity among the intelligentsia,
and more intensely still among certain "centres" within the
intelligentsia, such as: those in the main cities of Leningrad, Moscow,
and Kiev; those old enough to have remembered significantly different
conditions in earlier phases of Soviet history or pre-history (e.g., the
senior generation of engineers and artistic intellectuals, and the Old
Bolsheviks of Lenin's generation); those younger intelligenty in key
contemporary posts in science and culture; and racial "aliens", viewed
either as outsiders innately disposed to subversion or as potential
scapegoats.

Outside the peak periods of terror - and, among certain strata of the
Soviet populace, even within these peak periods - the social control of
state-generated fear slackened, creating temporal, geographical, and
social pockets of comparative relaxation within which another more or
less constant factor of Soviet life found limited room for expression:
resistance. Such resistance took many forms, from simple street cynicism
concerning government announcements about the availability of
toothbrushes to sophisticated principled dissent against the political
system of the USSR in general. Yet, since the USSR was a police state,
such resistance during local relaxations in the otherwise prevailing
rule of fear always entailed an element of calculated risk - a risk
which rose according to the articulacy and publicity with which such
resistance was expressed.

One of the lesser risks (depending on the
time, place, and company in which the risk was taken) was the political
joke, a genre elaborated to unprecedented lengths under the Soviet
regime. For example, during 1930-6 (i.e., between the peak periods of
fear associated with the Cultural Revolution and the Great Terror),
special outlets in the cities, called Torgsin (commercial) shops, sold
"luxury" goods for gold and hard currency. A political joke was soon
doing the rounds whereby "Torgsin" was mutated into an acronym (itself a
joke at the expense of the Soviet bureaucracy's acronym-fetish):
"Tovarishchi Opomnites', Rossiia Gibnet, Stalin Istrebliaet Narod"
("Comrades Remember, Russia is Perishing, Stalin is Exterminating the
People"). Such jokes - not a few of which were circulated in anonymous
dissenting leaflets - provide evidence of popular resistance to Stalin
in the period before and after his crackdown following the assassination
of Kirov at the end of 1934.

At other times, political resistance within
the intelligentsia was able to manifest in public via stage productions,
such as Mayakovsky's The Bedbug (an Aesopian attack on
collectivism) and The Suicide by Shostakovich's friend[14] Nikolai Erdman, in which Semyon, the
jobless hero, announces that he will commit suicide at 12 o'clock the
next day and finds himself besieged by people asking him to champion
their causes in the arts or business before he dies, on the grounds that
only a suicide, having nothing to lose, can safely speak out in such a
society. "There are 200 million people in the USSR," proclaims Semyon,
"and all of them are scared. All except me. I fear nobody." These plays
by Mayakovsky and Erdman date from 1928-9 - the onset of Stalin's first
major attack on the Soviet intelligentsia as a social bloc. As that
onslaught turned into the Cultural Revolution, non-Party artists were
restrained or eliminated, and Aesopian satire became, for the duration,
impossible. Yet this sort of oblique artistic resistance revived once
conditions again became relatively relaxed (e.g., Nikolai Akimov's
satirical production of Hamlet in 1932, for which Shostakovich
wrote the music, as he had for Mayakovsky's The Bedbug), while
resistance among other social groups - workers, peasants, young
intelligenty, those in small towns or provincial cities - meanwhile
continued to find voice at various levels of overtness and articulacy.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell draws a broad distinction between
the Party (which in Oceania includes all of the intelligentsia, whether
resistant or not) and the proles, "those swarming, disregarded masses,
85 per cent of the population" whom the Party - or rather the
politically active Inner Party, equivalent to the Soviet
apparat, or, in some parts of the novel, the nomenklatura
- controls with a mind-quietening diet of sport and pornography.
Something akin to this broad distinction existed in the USSR in that
Stalin concentrated his efforts at control by fear, or straightforward
elimination, upon the intelligentsia, a class long skilled at
formulating sophisticated opinions and generating subversive political
jokes of the sort given above. Yet, in the interludes of relative
relaxation - and more or less constantly among the Soviet "proles" and
the younger (and hence less cautious) intelligenty - such expressions of
resistance were common, and sedulously gathered by secret police agents
and their informers.

A recent book (Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in
Stalin's Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934-1941,
Cambridge University Press, 1997) examines this ongoing expression of
popular resistance by means of such NKVD and Party reports, showing
widespread scepticism, and even open contempt, for official accounts of
the Kirov murder and the show-trials which followed it (albeit that the
most functional strata of the populace, their lives dominated by
thought-excluding drudgery, took no serious notice of what they saw as a
remote internecine quarrel among their new Communist bosses, confining
their resistance to grumbles about bread-shortages[15]). Above the level of the archetypal
"proles", from thinking urban workers upwards, dissent was common,
sharpening into more articulate resistance as the intelligence of those
involved rose. For example, Davies notes a rumour in the mid-Thirties
that the USSR's population had declined from 175 million to 135 million
as a result of Soviet state terror. Such rumours were reported in police
files as originating among the intelligenty, especially Soviet
Jews.

Davies also publishes excerpts from overtly resistant leaflets
("suggesting intelligentsia authorship") which appeared during the
Terror, calling for revolt against the "bloody" tyranny of Bolshevik
dictatorship. But her most fascinating chapter[16] describes the growth of resistance to the
Stalin cult as it inflated to "gigantomanic" proportions during 1935-7[17], an account which makes it clear that
antipathy to Stalin was widely felt and voiced. To give a single example,
Davies records that, in 1934, among young people, it was popular to
decipher SSSR [USSR] as "Smert' Stalina Spaset Rossiiu" ["Stalin's Death
will Save Russia"].[18] It should be noted
that, in 1934, Shostakovich, then 27, was among these young people.

Such, in general terms, is the socio-political background against which
Shostakovich lived and worked. On the face of it, it would be surprising
if he and his music had remained unaffected by any of this, and more
surprising still if he had, during his life, formed no opinions whatever
about it, whether pro- or anti-Soviet. Yet pundits in the West who
espouse the "anti-revisionist" position on Shostakovich - i.e., will not
concede that Testimony is a fair representation of his outlook
and do not accept that he was anti-communist; or suspect that he may, in
some sense, have been anti-communist, but held this conviction weakly,
or arrived at it late and attempted to back-date it through
Testimony - are united in neither professing nor demonstrating
anything much beyond a pitifully superficial acquaintance with this
background.

For example, Richard Taruskin, in his purported discussion
of the Soviet reception of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony in Fanning's
Shostakovich Studies, and Laurel Fay, in her article on the
alleged provenance of From Jewish Folk Poetry in The New York
Times, have both ventured some general opinions on the Soviet
background which, for the most part, are factually wrong and
interpretively obtuse or gullible.[19]
Christopher Norris, a professed expert on "the politics of culture", has
said almost nothing about the socio-political background to
Shostakovich's music; what little he has said is, again, inaccurate or
dimly credulous.[20] As for other
anti-revisionists, like Malcolm Brown and David Fanning (who may place
himself on neither side of the controversy), they have, to my knowledge,
scarcely spoken of this background at all.

It is worth remembering why such pundits are called "anti-revisionists".
Before the publication of Testimony in 1979, the view among
Western music critics was that Shostakovich was a distinguished, if
occasionally puzzling, alumnus of the Soviet system and ideology who
was, in some sense, a communist and in no sense at odds with the
policies and practices of the Soviet regime (under which he had received
many honours and for which he had written occasional works, propagandist
film scores, ostensibly conformist symphonies, and a multitude of
orthodox articles and speeches whose political views he reiterated in
interviews given to journalists). In terms of his music, these
assumptions about him were, for the most part, accepted, and, in
rudimentary conceptual ways, integrated into the technical analyses to
which Western musicologists routinely subjected his music. For the sake
of identification, I propose to call this position on Shostakovich the
Naive Approach. After Testimony, the Naive Approach to
Shostakovich, while by no means unviable in very general terms,[21] was less easily justifiable in the
rudimentary conceptual ways established hitherto.

As a result, certain
puzzling aspects of Shostakovich began to come to the fore and, rather
than a straightforward communist laureate, he began to be seen as a
troubled, contradictory introvert, much traumatised by Russia's
gargantuan war-losses and yet, for some reason, unworried (or only
retrospectively worried) by the comparably gargantuan internal losses
inflicted on the USSR by its rulers from 1917 onwards. With the
appearance of Bernard Haitink's recorded cycle of Shostakovich's
symphonies, the composer started to be viewed less as an heroic Soviet
artist with the occasional inscrutable hiatus, and more as a tragic
neo-Mahlerian figure, flawed by incongruous outbursts of apparent
vulgarity, but otherwise transparently sincere. The feeling, for
example, among Gramophonereviewers during the six or seven years
after Testimony was, in effect, that Haitink's Decca cycle had
raised the whole tone of Shostakovich symphony recordings, if not of
Shostakovich symphonies per se.

Where the likes of the Ninth and
Eleventh had previously been sniffed at, they now became works to take
seriously (or at least not to dismiss as casually as before). Whenever a
new Shostakovich symphony disc came out, reviewers adopted the
reverential manner formerly reserved for new recordings of symphonies by
Beethoven and Bruckner. Shostakovich symphonies were now seen as
"tragic" works of "great intensity"; reviewers were accordingly "much
moved", even "spellbound", by them. Despite the New Solemnity of
Shostakovich reception in the Gramophone of the mid-Eighties, all
that the magazine's writers felt safe to venture in exegesis of this
intense, spellbinding tragedy was the prudently general view that it
derived from the composer having lived in "troubled times".

The most
perceptive Gramophone reviewer of this period, Michael Oliver
received the 1984 paperback of Christopher Norris's Shostakovich: the
man and his music with the observation that "this book must be read
as a whole, and judiciously chewed, not swallowed". Yet he was by
himself in venturing that he heard subversive undertones (let alone
anything satirically sarcastic) in these works. (He found "irony and
anxiety at the very heart of the Ninth Symphony", reporting the finale
of Kondrashin's 1980 version to be, far from non-stop jollity, "a
horridly sinister thing".) Meanwhile his colleagues continued to discuss
Shostakovich symphony recordings in generalised terms of tempi
("spacious" ones preferred), sound quality (ditto), and the occasional
interpretative allusion to the mysterious Russian landscape (ditto
again) or, alternatively, to "the interior landscape of the Russian
soul" (Robert Layton on the Tenth).

The New Solemnity in Shostakovich studies came to an end around the time
of the fall of the USSR in 1991. Then, my book The New
Shostakovich, together with fresh testimony and evidence in
the form of interviews and articles from colleagues of the composer
freed by the absence of state-created fear or Soviet censorship to speak
their minds, combined into a third position against both the "communist
laureate" conception central to the erstwhile Naive Approach to
Shostakovich and the "tragic introvert" (or "Hamlet figure") vaguely
envisaged under the New Solemnity which replaced it. This third
position, congruent with the view of Shostakovich proposed in
Testimony and in isolated comments made by his former colleagues
(and his son Maxim) during the 1980s, is that of revisionism in
Shostakovich studies[22] - that for which
revision is urged being our basic interpretation of Shostakovich's
attitudes to the Soviet regime with regard to their bearing on the
expressive aspects of his music. Intrinsic to revisionism is the
proposition that, far from helplessly immersed in the unhappy aspects of
his "troubled times", Shostakovich was bitterly critical of those
responsible for Russia's woes and that therefore his music is as
satirical as it is tragic.

Since revisionism directly challenges both of its rival positions on
Shostakovich, it is inevitable that what amounts to a fourth position,
anti-revisionism, now exists in order to rebut it. Anti-revisionism,
which takes as its fundamental tenet the alleged fraudulence of
Testimony, is a heterogeneous outlook embracing everything from
the unreconstructed Naive Approach, through variations on the "tragic
introvert" model, to more attacking postures in which Shostakovich is
claimed to have written several key works not, as revisionists would
insist, in a spirit of resistance or "secret dissidence" amounting to
protest, but as deliberate sops to the Soviet regime in the hope of
rehabilitation. The model of Shostakovich proposed in the attacking form
of anti-revisionism implies a man of flexible, or inert, ethical make-up
who, whether out of confused ambivalence or craven self-interest, did
not attempt to disassociate himself from the Soviet regime until the
early 1960s, and then only superficially and ambiguously, continuing to
"accept" official posts and refusing to assume the role of an overt
dissident, like Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Grigorenko, Yakir, Kim, and
others. This, to borrow the coinage of two prominent advocates of such
attacking anti-revisionism, may be called the "collaborator" model of
Shostakovich.[23]

Whatever we understand to
be meant by this term, it at least has the virtue of ostensible clarity.
Here anti-revisionism unequivocally contends that the general Soviet
socio-political background, outlined above, did not affect Shostakovich
in the way it affected the many who, despite the fear spread by the
Soviet state in order to discourage dissent, expressed resistance in
various ways throughout the entire period of Soviet rule; or that this
background did affect Shostakovich in much the same ways as it affected
Soviet citizens neither too overworked to think, too frightened to feel,
too deprived of information to form a judgement, nor too morally
incompetent to be disturbed by their impressions - but that he chose not
to express such impressions in his life or work, becoming instead
effectively a part-time collaborator with the Soviet regime.

Inasmuch as the negative character of the Soviet regime is very firmly
established, the "collaborator" model of Shostakovich interpretation
amounts to a charge against him of complicity in the crimes and
oppressions of that regime; indeed, the main interpretive line flowing
from the "collaborator model" is that Shostakovich was a man haunted by
guilt for such complicity. One apparent justification for this thesis is
that the original title of Testimony was to be Testimony of
Guilt. Yet there is a vast difference between, on the one hand,
supposing Shostakovich to have been haunted by guilt for direct
collaborative complicity with the Soviet regime, and, on the other,
deducing that he, like many other intelligenty, had been haunted
by guilt for the paralysing fear which prevented him speaking out (other
than in Aesopian ways or through his works) against a regime he loathed
and had loathed throughout his life.

In the end, what is at issue is Shostakovich's music: is it expressive
of resistance, of complicity, or of neither? Musical sceptics
unacquainted with Soviet history often ask whether such a question has
any intrinsic validity. Music is music, they argue; how can it matter
what it is "about"? Since the emergence, during the last few years, of
so much shocking testimony from friends and colleagues of
Shostakovich, the popularity of this thoughtless contention has,
thankfully, dwindled.[24] In its place,
there is a new objection, proposed by certain anti-revisionists, that to
interrogate Shostakovich's music as to whether it can be said to resist,
abet, or ignore the crimes and oppressions of the Soviet regime is to
propose a "crudely one-dimensional" (or "ideological") criterion. It
should be noted that this has never been said of the Naive Approach,
whereby Shostakovich's communist orthodoxy is "given" and, as such, an
integral assumption of interpretation[25];
nor, evidently, is it deemed applicable to such inarguable crudities as
Richard Taruskin's claim that Shostakovich, in Lady Macbeth,
endorsed Stalin's genocidal policy of collectivisation[26] or Laurel Fay's idea that Shostakovich
wrote From Jewish Folk Poetry to appease Soviet demands for
folk-nationalism, foiling his own manoeuvre by inadvertently picking
"the 'wrong' folk".[27]

Indeed, to ask
whether Shostakovich resisted or complied in his music - to enquire, in
effect, whether he was a "collaborator" or a "secret dissident" - is not
an ideological but a moral question and, as such, one both fundamental
and traditional to all critical apparatus, musical or otherwise. Nor,
as I hope the material set forth above will have established, is there
anything intrinsically "one-dimensional" in proposing that
Shostakovich's music be set against the socio-political background of
Soviet society and morally interrogated accordingly. The historical
reality is abstruse, subtle, and multifarious. "Crudity" is merely in
the eye of the ill-informed pundit.

Given the character of the Soviet regime, the charges of complicity and
collaboration made by leading anti-revisionists are in effect a case for
the prosecution, i.e., far from a moral giant, as most of his former
friends and colleagues believe (and, so far as revisionists are
concerned, his music self-evidently proclaims), Shostakovich was at best
fearful, morally confused, and intellectually inconsistent; at worst a
justly guilt-ridden trimmer who spent his life trying to suck up to a
gang of outrageous political criminals. Those adhering to the Naive
Approach naturally put a different spin on this: Shostakovich was indeed
faithful to the regime - but why not? The USSR was, they assert on no
discernible factual basis, a noble socialistic enterprise disfigured by
Stalin's megalomania, but in other respects (apart, perhaps, from a
regrettable lack of democratic free expression) morally superior to
"capitalist imperialism".

Since we have before us what amounts to a
preliminary case for the prosecution, it is the duty of those taking a
contrary view to deploy a case for the defence. Such a case is, of
course, fully argued in The New Shostakovich and Shostakovich
Reconsidered. However, in a court of law, the logic of advocacy differs
in kind from the first-hand experience and personal viewpoints of
primary witnesses to facts adduced by defence or prosecution. Advocacy
is rational and persuasive; witnesses are more immediate in impact -
more vivid, more emotionally affecting. And, in the end, without such
witnesses, neither defence nor prosecution can present an entirely
convincing case. Since it is a well-tried tactic of anti-revisionism to
imply that there is an equivalence of witness - and hence of credibility
- on either side of the debate, it is time to make clear how far this is
from the truth. We must turn to the witnesses for the defence in the
case of Dmitry Shostakovich versus anti-revisionism and the Naive
Approach.

II: The Witnesses

The largest single collection of individual testimony to who
Shostakovich was and what he did is that edited by Elizabeth Wilson in
Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (Faber & Faber, 1994). Wilson
offers 81 individual "witnesses", of which around two-thirds constitute
statements taken from existing books and articles, the rest being
derived from interviews conducted by her or written contributions
elicited by her during 1988-90. Of these 81 witnesses, 36 offer one or
more statements showing that Shostakovich was disaffected with the
Soviet regime in ways ranging from distaste to open hatred.[28] Of the remaining witnesses, 42[29] may be classified as neutral on this
question in that their comments contain no explicit or implicit
political content, although most are complimentary about Shostakovich's
character and motives - dependable indicators in a totalitarian environment. (This
would not be true of a similar list of testimonials to the character and
motives of, for example, Dmitri Kabalevsky.)

Moreover, the testimonies
of many of the "neutral" witnesses also strongly suggest, without giving
specific positive evidence, that Shostakovich held the Soviet regime in
low esteem (e.g., the testimony of Lyubov' Rudneva, pp. 248-55). Only 3
witnesses make statements remotely susceptible to the interpretation
that Shostakovich ever, at any time, had any sympathy with communism -
and one of these has elsewhere made emphatic statements to the opposite
effect. All in all, a fair-minded person would conclude from
Shostakovich: A Life Remembered alone that the composer was
seriously disaffected with communism; indeed one reviewer of Wilson's
book, Terry Teachout, wrote thus: "Testimony or no
Testimony, it is no longer possible to regard Shostakovich as a
faithful servant of the Communist party. Shostakovich: A Life
Remembered leaves no doubt whatsoever that he hated Stalin, hated
Communism, hated the apparatchiki and the nomenklatura,
and that much of his music was in some meaningful sense intended to
convey this hatred."[30] Let us examine the
testimonies of the 36 witnesses who make statements of this sort in
Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (to which page numbers in the
text below refer).

For the Defence

1) Zoya Shostakovich The composer's younger sister provides an
invaluable insight into the atmosphere of his home life during boyhood,
a picture confirmed by Boris Lossky and Nadezhda Galli-Shohat. In common
with other intelligenty, Shostakovich's father welcomed the
revolution of February 1917 as a liberation from Tsarism (p. 6).
However, his and his wife Sofiya's political views, far from radical or
ideologically specific, appear to have been humanely generalised. "The
atmosphere in our house," says Zoya, "was very free and liberal" - i.e.,
there were no prevailing sacred opinions derived from a fixed ideology
such as Marxism or the programme of the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs).
Sofiya gave temporary shelter to "all kinds of people... Chernosotintsy
[anti-semitic Black Hundreds] and communists included". This equivalence
of right-wing anti-semites and communists implies that they were equably
regarded by the family as similarly extreme (even though the latter
included Shostakovich's uncle Maxim Kostrykin). Otherwise, Zoya
represents the Shostakoviches as effectively apolitical: "I do not
remember talk of politics." (p. 6) This was at a time, between the
February and October revolutions, when most intelligenty argued
incessantly about politics.[31]

2) Boris Lossky A fellow pupil of Dmitri's at the
Shidlovskaya Gymnasium, Lossky confirms Zoya's contentions about the
Shostakovich family's virtually apolitical outlook, recording that
Dmitri's parents "belonged to the liberal traditions of the
intelligentsia", adding that "the family was of a fairly conservative
nature" (p. 30). In that communism is militantly atheistic, it is
significant that Sofiya Shostakovich gave Dmitri's father a full
Orthodox funeral which she took very seriously (pp. 30-1). It is of even
greater significance that Madame Grekov, in her funeral oration, made an
extremely risky reference to "the thinning ranks of the intelligentsia".
By 1922, Lenin's antipathy to intelligenty who held views other
than his had ensured that thousands of these had been executed or sent
to the Gulag (Solovki). This places the Shostakoviches among the
mainstream of the intelligentsia in that it would have meant automatic
arrest to have said this at the funeral of, for example, an SR
(particularly in 1922).

Lossky (p. 12) recalls Shostakovich performing
his Funeral March in Memory of Victims of the Revolution at the
Stoyunina Gymnasium in January 1918 as part of a memorial for the
intelligenty killed by communist troops whilst protesting Lenin's
dissolution of the democratically elected Constituent Assembly.[32] As for the Shidlovskaya school, Lossky
describes its pupils as "chiefly drawn from the ranks of the
'out-lived'[33] liberal intelligentsia who
were unsympathetic to the 'official' [Soviet] bureaucracy of the day" (p.
13). One of these pupils, though, was none other than Trotsky's son Lev,
with whom Dmitri "particularly" failed to get on. "During the spring of
1918, during Trotsky's rise to power," says Lossky, "Mitya never so much
as hinted at any kind of sympathy with the 'existing regime', and I can
vouch that this was the case until 1922". (In 1922, Shostakovich entered
the Petrograd Conservatory as a full student.)

3) Evgeny Chukovsky Chukovsky testifies that, in later
years, Shostakovich recalled the publicly-displayed lists of those shot
as "Enemies of the People" in the years after the revolution. Given the
testimonies of Zoya and Boris Lossky, we can assume that this
recollection was distasteful and, as such, representative of the young
Dmitri's sentiments at the time.

4) Nadezhda Galli-Shohat Shostakovich's aunt confirms the
impressions of Zoya and Boris Lossky: "Mitya did not belong to any
party, nor did Sonya [Sofiya, his mother]; and Sonya had lost her job
partly on account of it." (p. 29) She adds: "It was clear that Mitya's
position in the conservatory during this winter [1923-24] was only
tolerated." So conspicuous were the young Shostakovich's lack of
communist credentials at this point that a group of politically
motivated fellow students tried, in spring 1924, to oust him and have
his stipend suspended. (In September 1924, his home piano, on loan from
Muzpred, was repossessed.) Galli-Shohat's contentions are supported by
Nikolai Malko's claim that, in 1923, Shostakovich failed to answer a
single question in the political section of his piano exam.[34] Significantly, the only references to
Lenin in Shostakovich's letters to Tatyana Glivenko occur around the
time that he was being persecuted by communist students at the
conservatory. Three of the four references are implicitly sceptical,
including two instances of giving his address as "Saint Leninburg".[35]

5) Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky Confirming that Dmitri
shared his immediate family's marked lack of interest in politics,
Bogdanov-Berezovsky portrays him as "totally absorbed" in his music, an
opinion echoed by the composer himself in a letter to the musicologist
Boleslav Yavorsky (16th April 1925) in which he states: "There are no
other joys in life apart from music. For me, all of life is music." (p.
30) Bogdanov-Berezovsky also remarks (p. 26) on the young Shostakovich's
"early independence of thought and behaviour" (dependable Aesopian code
for "he wasn't a communist", inasmuch as independent thought and
communist orthodoxy were, in practical terms, mutually exclusive).

6) Gavriil Yudin Yudin describes the teenage Shostakovich's
"ferocious wit and lively spirit" and recalls "all kinds of pranks,
jokes, and improvised parodies which tumbled out of him in rich
abundance". This tends to support Bogdanov-Berezovsky's hint that he was
not a communist since, even in the 1920s, political orthodoxy and
frivolity were incompatible in the USSR. That Shostakovich annoyed the
conservatory's Soviet administrators is clear from the fact that, in
spring 1924, his application for the post-graduate piano course was
refused because of "his youth and immaturity". (Defying the conservatory
council, Leonid Nikolayev gave him free piano lessons. In the end,
Shostakovich found conditions so hard that he applied to be transferred
to Moscow.)

7) Mikhail Druskin Druskin confirms Shostakovich's love of
satire and "keen eye for the ridiculous" (p. 41). He further confirms
Bogdanov-Berezovsky's view of Shostakovich's outlook: "From his first
creative efforts, Shostakovich occupied an independent position and
defined his own terms in art without submitting to the aesthetic of the
recognized authorities... His deep sense of responsibility towards life
and art was an organic constituent of his make-up, and he totally
accepted the moral principles behind these concepts." (pp. 42, 44)
Anyone espousing moral principles in the USSR of the 1920s would have
been identified as one of the "'old' people" in that the October
revolution explicitly redefined traditional morality in terms of
political expediency (i.e., moral decency ceased to exist, being
replaced by communist doctrine). Druskin expands upon this by noting
that Shostakovich was indifferent to, or aloof from, most of the
fashionable left-wing art trends of the 1920s. Instead, "he searched for
a more dynamic, complete expression of the national tradition within the
context of modern-day actuality, resonant as it was with the dramatic
events of a turbulent history, and a threatening sense of catastrophe"
(p. 45). Druskin clearly implies that Shostakovich took a critical
attitude to contemporary Soviet political developments.

8) Tatyana Glivenko With its Leninist chorus, Shostakovich's
Second Symphony is often taken to be a work exhibiting its composer's
communist orthodoxy. There are several reasons to doubt this, but Tanya
Glivenko gives a particularly strong one: that Shostakovich thought
Bezymensky's verses for the aforementioned chorus "quite disgusting" (p.
61). This sentiment is voiced by Shostakovich himself in a letter to
Tanya dated 28th May 1927: "Bezymensky has written abominable verses...
I'm afraid I won't be able to handle them." This left-wing poem - which
finishes with the fervent exclamations "October! Communism! and Lenin!"
- is as creatively uninspired as it is "politically correct". The
logical conclusion from his dislike of these verses is that Shostakovich
himself was no closer to being "politically correct" in 1927 than he had
been in 1924, when he was targeted as vulnerably apolitical by left-wing
students at the Leningrad Conservatory. Moreover, his dismissive
attitude to Bezymensky's verses in 1927 is consistent with his later
contempt for the communist libretti for his three ballets.[36]

9) Nikolai Malko Malko confirms that Shostakovich despised
Bezymensky's Leninist verses for the Second Symphony: "He simply laughed
at them." He adds that Shostakovich had no more sympathy with the
left-wing agitation group RAPM, the Russian Association of Proletarian
Musicians, "and its limited ideas of simplification" (p. 62). RAPM was
one of the groups used by Stalin as proxies to police his Cultural
Revolution in 1928-32; as such, it was instrumental in bans or early
closures for several Shostakovich theatre works of that era.[37] Former members of the proletarian groups
continued to persecute Shostakovich through official bodies and
committees until the late 1950s.

10) Pavel Maranchik Maranchik records (pp. 78-79) a
remarkable public run-in at the Leningrad branch of TRAM between
Shostakovich and some RAPM representatives: "A fierce argument arose
over the various ways in which Soviet musical culture should be
developed. Shostakovich proved that in itself the term 'proletarian
composer' was absolutely meaningless... and that many proletarian
composers write noisy declarations and very mediocre music." In view of
the conditions of the time, this was astonishingly outspoken behaviour
and presumably the incident dates from no later than 1929.[38]

11) Yuri Yelagin Confirming the claims of Glivenko, Malko,
and Maranchik, Yelagin records that, in Akimov's 1932 production of
Hamlet, for which Shostakovich wrote the music, the composer
"angrily mocked both the Soviet authorities and [RAPM] who at that time
were at the height of their power and caused much harm to Russian music
and musicians" (p. 82). By 1932, conditions had eased sufficiently to
allow such Aesopian satire to be presented on stage again, as it had
been before the Cultural Revolution.

12) Venyamin Basner Basner asserts that Shostakovich
displayed "great courage" after the Pravda attacks and Composers' Union
debates of early 1936, pressing ahead with rehearsals for his subversive
Fourth Symphony until "the bosses" forced him to withdraw the work.
(Basner's story about Shostakovich's alleged interrogation in 1937,
together with his attached doubts about Testimony, are
unreliable and not to be taken at face value.[39])

13) Boris Khaikin Tonality was a political issue both during
the Cultural Revolution and under the auspices of Socialist Realism
after 1932. Minor keys were frowned upon; the "bright future" of
socialism could only be associated with the major keys. Khaikin recalls
a conversation with the composer in late 1937: "Shostakovich told me: 'I
finished the Fifth Symphony in the major and fortissimo... It would be
interesting to know what would have been said if I finished it
pianissimo and in the minor.' Only later did I understand the full
significance of these words, when I heard the Fourth Symphony, which
does finish in the minor and pianissimo." (p. 127)[40]

14) Mikhail Chulaki Chulaki supplies an amusingly sarcastic
account of the Soviet apparat's reception of Shostakovich's
Fifth Symphony (pp. 132-8), showing that they did not understand it
(trying to pass off its genuine popular success as a plot by the
composer's formalist friends) and that its official acceptance was
forced on the apparat rather than freely bestowed on Shostakovich
as a "foreordained... immediate reward" (the words of Richard Taruskin,
whose polemic on the reception of the Fifth omits any reference to
Chulaki's deposition or to the supporting testimonies of Glikman and
Gauk).[41]

15) Flora Litvinova Litvinova, a long-standing friend of
Shostakovich, wrote a memoir for inclusion in Elizabeth Wilson's book. A
passage in which Litvinova implicitly gives credence to
Testimony[42] was omitted by Wilson
because she "did not want to get too involved in the whole vexed
question about the authenticity of Volkov's Testimony".[43] Flora Litvinova got to know Shostakovich
during his war-time evacuation to Kuibyshev, where he confided the
meaning of his "anti-fascist" Seventh Symphony: "National Socialism is
not the only form of Fascism; this music is about all forms of terror,
slavery, the bondage of the spirit." Later Shostakovich told Litvinova
"straight out" that the Seventh Symphony ("and for that matter the Fifth
as well") were not just about Fascism, but about "our system, or any
form of totalitarian regime" (pp. 158-9). Shostakovich, says Litvinova,
was very upset by Zhdanov's ban on Akhmatova and Zoshchenko in 1946 (p.
201), while he and his wife Nina were "despondent" about the
apparat's treatment of Soviet Jews (pp. 202, 206).

As for his
view of communism, she recounts a conversation of 1956 in which
Picasso's name was mentioned (pp. 271-2): "Dmitry Dmitriyevich burst
out, 'Don't speak to me of him, he's a bastard.' We were stunned.
'Picasso, that bastard, hails Soviet power and our communist system at a
time when his followers here are persecuted, hounded. and not allowed to
work.' I interjected: 'But your followers are also hounded and
persecuted.' 'Well, yes, I too am a bastard, coward and so on, but I'm
living in a prison. You can understand that I'm living in a prison, and
that I am frightened for my children and for myself. But he's living in
freedom and he doesn't have to tell lies...' I tried to explain that
Picasso probably didn't know what was going on in our country [and]
pointed out that Picasso probably backed the idea of communism in
general... 'And you, too, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, are for the ideas of
communism.' He answered, 'No, communism is impossible.'" Litvinova is of
the opinion that Shostakovich joined the Communist Party in 1960 under
duress, because he was "simply afraid" (p. 308).

16) Isaak Glikman Glikman is discreet to a fault and also
somewhat naive. While his upsetting account (pp. 338-9) of
Shostakovich's distress upon being forced to join the Communist Party in
1960 is sufficient in itself to establish the composer's attitude
towards his country's political regime at that time, his commentary on
Shostakovich's letters to him avoids overt political interpretations.
Occasionally, however, he allows himself the luxury of underlining
Shostakovich's political views in his observations on certain Aesopian
passages in these letters - passages which, in themselves, establish the
continuity of Shostakovich's anti-communism from at least 1942 (e.g., p.
175).[44]

17) Sofia Gubaidulina Gubaidulina recalls that her
generation (born around 1930) was very disappointed when Shostakovich
joined the Party in 1960, believing him merely to have caved in and
capitulated for "a carrot" (i.e., a measure of shelter and security). "I
now realize," she adds, "that the circumstances he lived under were
unbearably cruel, more than anyone should have to endure... I see him as
pain personified, the epitomy of the tragedy and terror of our times"
(p. 307). It should be noted that the composers of Gubaidulina's
generation were so completely disillusioned with Soviet society that
disappointment with Shostakovich's capitulation was the only possible
response for them; indeed, the very fact that his action was seen as a
capitulation - rather than (as those Westerners who follow the Naive
Approach would assume) a confirmation of his principled communist
commitment - is damning in itself and illustrates all too clearly why
Shostakovich should have been suicidally agitated at being thus coerced.

18) Lev Lebedinsky Lebedinsky confirms that Shostakovich
"hated and despised" the Communist Party (p. 336) and suggests that the
composer was tricked into signing the application for membership after
having been "plied with drink". Lebedinsky continues: "As the date of
the meeting where Shostakovich was to be 'admitted to the Party ranks'
drew near, Dmitri Dmitriyevich's life became a torment. He went up to
Leningrad, where he hid in his sister's flat, as if escaping from his
own conscience... Shostakovich was so conditioned by fear that no
logical argument or reasoning could reach him. In the end I literally
physically restrained him from going to the station to take the night
train, and forced him to send a telegram saying that he was ill." As a
result of this, the Party meeting could not be canceled: "The
authorities had to resort to deception, announcing that Shostakovich had
been taken ill so suddenly that there was no time to notify all the
invited Party members. Since an unprecedented number of people had
gathered to witness Shostakovich's ultimate humiliation, in their eyes
the cancellation of the Party meeting acquired the proportions of a
major public scandal. They all formed the impression that Shostakovich
was being pushed into the Party by force." (p. 337)

Lebedinsky relates
the Eighth Quartet[45] to this chain of
events: "The composer dedicated the Quartet to the victims of fascism to
disguise his intentions, although, as he considered himself a victim of
a fascist regime, the dedication was apt... He associated joining the
Party with a moral, as well as physical, death. On the day of his return
from a trip to Dresden, where he had completed the Quartet and purchased
a large number of sleeping pills, he played the Quartet to me on the
piano and told me with tears in his eyes that it was his last work. He
hinted at his intention to commit suicide. Perhaps subconsciously he
hoped that I would save him. I managed to remove the pills from his
jacket pocket and gave them to his son Maxim, explaining to him the true
meaning of the Quartet. I pleaded with him never to let his father out
of his sight. During the next few days I spent as much time as possible
with Shostakovich until I felt that the danger of suicide had passed."
(pp. 340-1)

Lebedinsky is categorical that Shostakovich was a lifelong
anti-communist: "As a true democrat, he deeply detested the communist
system, which continuously threatened his very life... When I remarked
to Dmitri Dmitriyevich, 'You were the first to declare war against
Stalin,' he did not deny it." (p. 335) Lebedinsky contends that Rayok
was written as a secret protest against the Soviet regime in 1948 (pp.
298-9) and that Shostakovich originally composed the Twelfth Symphony as
a satire on Lenin but rewrote it at the last minute, fearing that his
intentions were too obvious (pp. 346-7). Elizabeth Wilson provides some
corroborating evidence (p. 344).[46]

19) Marina Sabinina Sabinina's evaluation of the Soviet
cultural scene is particularly contemptuous. She describes Shostakovich
satirically mimicking Soviet officials during the winter of 1949-50 (p.
225)[47] and recalls his tone of "venomous
sarcasm" in speaking of them (p. 310). Most damning is her account of
his self-revulsion at being forced to read out a "piece of idiotic,
disgusting nonsense concocted by some nobody" (presented as his own
opinion) at the 1948 Composers' Union congress. He "shrieked": "I read
like the most paltry wretch, a parasite, a puppet, a cut-out paper doll
on a string!" (pp. 293-5)

20) Yuri Lyubimov Lyubimov confirms that, far from believing
in and supporting the statements and articles which he read out or which
appeared over his signature, Shostakovich often did not even read them -
indeed would sign anything without looking at it in order to be left
alone by Soviet officials, whom he despised and feared (p. 183). This
fact is confirmed by Galina Vishnevskaya (p. 430), Sergei Slonimsky (pp.
430-432), and Edison Denisov (pp. 432-3).[48] Lyubimov adds: "People told me that he
used to carry a briefcase with a change of underwear and a toothbrush in
constant expectation of arrest... It is also recounted how he waited for
his arrest at night out on the landing by the lift, so that at least his
family wouldn't be disturbed if they came to get him."

21) Karen Khachaturian "Shostakovich's favourite New Year
toast reflected his philosophical irony: 'Let's drink to this - that
things don't get any better!' After all, it was constantly being drummed
into us that things would improve in our society; whereas we knew
perfectly well that in reality things only ever got worse!' (p. 185)

22) Isaak Schwartz Schwartz relates how, while his father
was in the Gulag and his family internally exiled, Shostakovich secretly
paid for his education during 1946-8, a period when Soviet Jews
were being publicly persecuted as part of the officially approved
post-war campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" (pp. 219-222).[49] Anyone aiding Soviet Jews at this time
was by definition anti-Stalinist and in serious danger.

23) Rafiil Khozak Khozak (p. 234) states that, in 1948,
Shostakovich sheltered the Jewish musicologist Moshe Beregovsky while he
was on the run from the Soviet authorities in Kiev.

24) Thomas Sanderling Sanderling states (pp. 232-4) that
Shostakovich always helped "innocently persecuted victims" in the
aftermath of Stalin's death in 1953: "Anyone who came into contact with
Shostakovich, whoever he might be, could not but be intensely aware of
being in the presence of a person of great spiritual purity and moral
fibre." (p. 419)

25) Abraam Gozenpud "Shostakovich first showed his cycle
From Jewish Folk Poetry at the Moscow Union of Composers early in
1953, just after the news bulletin in the press had appeared denouncing
the Doctors. This provoked an immediate reaction from many well-known
and famous persons demanding punishment of 'the murderers in white
coats' (who were mostly Jews). Therefore, the performance of this cycle
at that time was an act of great civic courage." (p. 238)

26) Natalya Vovsi-Mikhoels Madame Vainberg describes how
Shostakovich courageously wrote a letter of protest against her
husband's arrest in 1953 (p. 231). For her, From Jewish Folk
Poetry was "an open protest... against the hounding of the Jews in
this last five year plan [1946-50] of Stalin's" (p. 229). She further
recounts Shostakovich's amusement over the announcer's statement at the
belated premiere of From Jewish Folk Poetry in 1955, concerning
the line "Your father is in Siberia", that this sad situation "all took
place in Tsarist Russia". Evidently, as with the Eleventh Symphony, the
original historical setting had a dual (contemporary) focus and
significance so far as he was concerned.

27) Zoya Tomachevskaya "I was told by the choreographer,
Igor Belsky, who produced a wonderful ballet on the music of the
Eleventh Symphony, that, when he consulted Shostakovich, the composer
said to him, as if in passing: 'Don't forget that I wrote that symphony
in the aftermath of the Hungarian Uprising.'" (p. 320) Flora Litvinova
(p. 269) confirms that Shostakovich was eager for news of events in
Budapest in 1956. Lev Lebedinsky describes the Eleventh Symphony as "a
truly contemporary work... composed in the aftermath of the Soviet
invasion of Hungary" (pp. 318-9): "True, Shostakovich gave it the title
'1905', but... we heard in this music... not the police firing on the
crowd in front of the Winter Palace in 1905, but the Soviet tanks
roaring in the streets of Budapest. This was so clear to those 'who had
ears to listen', that his son, with whom he wasn't in the habit of
sharing his deepest thoughts, whispered to Dmitri Dmitriyevich during
the dress rehearsals, 'Papa, what if they hang you for this?'"

28) Yevgeny Mravinsky Mravinsky, in an article collected for
Soviet publication in 1967, speaks Aesopically about his methodological
relationship with Shostakovich during their collaboration on his
symphonic music between 1937 and 1961. Referring to their first
encounter at rehearsals for the Fifth Symphony in 1937, Mravinsky writes
as follows: "However many questions I put to him, I didn't succeed in
eliciting anything from him... In truth, the character of our perception
of music differed greatly. I do not like to search for subjective,
literary and concrete images in music which is not by nature
programmatic, whereas Shostakovich very often explained his intentions
with very specific images and associations." By starting this last
sentence with his disclaimer, Mravinsky sets up a sceptical tone,
thereby allowing an important revelation (that Shostakovich "very often"
conceived his symphonic music in programmatic terms) to slip through
"past the censor", as it were (p. 139).

In reality, as Yakov Milkis
points out, Mravinsky himself likewise conceived Shostakovich's
symphonic music in this programmatic way: "For instance, during a
rehearsal of the Fifth Symphony, in the third movement, in the episode
where the oboe has a long solo over the tremolos of the 1st and then the
2nd violins, Mravinsky turned round to the violin sections and said,
'You're playing this tremolo with the wrong colour, you haven't got the
necessary intensity. Have you forgotten what this music is about and
when it was born?'... I remember another occasion when he was rehearsing
the Finale of the Ninth Symphony. He objected to the character of the
sound in the celli and double basses when they play in unison with
the trombones. 'You have the wrong sound. I need the sound of the
trampling of steel-shod boots.' (We knew that he wasn't referring to
ordinary soldiers, but to the KGB forces.)" (p. 315)

Shostakovich was
reticent about "explaining" his music, particularly to anyone he did not
know well, because he feared reprisals if such explanations ever reached
the wrong ears. In the case of rehearsals for the premiere of the Fifth
Symphony, he wrote a reciprocal account which Mravinsky quotes in his
article. Again, the approach is Aesopian: "It seemed to me that
[Mravinsky] was delving into too much detail, that he paid too much
attention to the particular, and it seemed that this would spoil the
overall plan, the general conception. Mravinsky subjected me to a real
interrogation on every bar, on my every idea, demanding an answer to any
doubts that had arisen in him. But by the fifth day of our
collaboration, I understood that his method was undoubtedly correct. A
conductor should not just sing like a nightingale."[50] (p. 140)

The ingenuous tone of these
comments is uncharacteristic. Shostakovich is known to have paid
intensive attention to the tiniest detail during rehearsals of his
works. (Indeed, Mravinsky goes on to describe how the composer objected
when the cor anglais played an octave down during a tutti in the second
movement of the Eighth Symphony [pp. 140-1], one of several such stories
recounted by Wilson's witnesses.) This can only mean that Shostakovich's
alleged "realisation" that Mravinsky was "undoubtedly correct" in
grilling him on detail is a rhetorical pose adopted for the sake of
conveying to readers the importance of paying close attention to the
details of his music, wherein, one must presume, lie clues to its
programmatic dimension.

That such programmatic clues depend on sometimes
very small expressive details is indicated by Valentin Berlinsky's
anecdote about Shostakovich firmly requiring the Borodin Quartet's
cellist to play the low F at the beginning of the Third Quartet arco
instead of pizzicato. The quartet made this change because they thought
it sounded better. "Yes, yes," Shostakovich hastily replied, "pizzicato
is much better, but please play arco all the same." (p. 245) We may
deduce that the composer actively wanted a crude effect in this passage,
having a programmatic meaning he wished thereby to imply. (I suggest a
rationale for this in The New Shostakovich, p. 181.)

29) Yakov Milkis Evidence that Shostakovich and Mravinsky
not only collaborated in rehearsals, but also colluded in making
Aesopian statements and gestures in connection with these rehearsals and
the resulting performances, is supplied by Milkis, a violinist with the
Leningrad Philharmonic. "Shostakovich," says Milkis, "never changed
anything in his scores which he always prepared meticulously" - a
carefulness which extended to his preparatory sessions with Mravinsky:
"[Shostakovich] had many preliminary meetings with Mravinsky where every
point, including the tempi, was agreed before orchestral rehearsals
began." (pp. 312-13)

This throws an intriguing light on Milkis's story
of rehearsals for the Eighth Symphony: "In the break Mravinsky turned
round to us and said, 'Do you know, I have the impression that here in
this place Dmitri Dmitriyevich has omitted something: there's a
discrepancy between the harmonies of these chords as they appear here
and where they occur elsewhere. I've always wanted to ask Dmitri
Dmitriyevich about this point, but somehow I have never got around to
it.' Just at this moment, Dmitri Dmitriyevich came up to Mravinsky, who
put the question to him without further ado. Dmitri Dmitriyevich glanced
at the score: 'Oh dear, what a terrible omission, what an error I have
committed. But you know what, let's leave it as it is, just let things
stay as they are.' We then understood that this 'error' was deliberate."
(p. 312)

In other words: (a) Shostakovich wished, via Mravinsky, to draw
the orchestra's attention to a significant distinction in the score; and
(b) Shostakovich and Mravinsky prearranged this piece of Aesopian
"theatre" in their preliminary meetings, during which Shostakovich
conceivably confided, in varying degrees of explicitness, the
programmatic significance of passages like these.

Milkis himself is
certainly convinced of this programmatic dimension: "I hear in all
[Shostakovich's] instrumental music a hidden text and even specific
words - and I hear a particular conflict, rather than a general drama."
(p. 315)[51] Of course, were this
programmatic dimension to operate in Shostakovich's music, it would have
to be self-consistent within works and very probably across whole chains
of works. This, too, Milkis is unafraid to propose: "Shostakovich's
whole musical output is logical and consistent in its expression.
Through it Dmitri Dmitriyevich found a way of registering a protest and
of mocking the Soviet regime. However, the irony and sarcasm in the
music are outweighed by a sense of profound tragedy." (p. 314)[52]

30) Kirill Kondrashin Kondrashin's account of events leading
up to the premiere of Shostakovich's openly anti-Soviet Thirteenth
Symphony (p. 357-62) makes it clear what he considered the composer's
attitudes towards the Soviet regime to be. Elsewhere,[53] Kondrashin joins Mravinsky and Milkis in
discerning a programmatic dimension in Shostakovich's instrumental
music: "The majority of Shostakovich's symphonies do not have titles and
at first glance appear to be plotless. Nevertheless, contemporaries
associate each of his symphonies with a specific period in the life of
the composer... Several of his symphonies elicited such vivid
associations with our reality that I developed them to full programme
detail. Dmitri Dmitryevich knew about my 'decodings'. He himself did not
like to discuss the subtext of his music and usually said nothing,
although he did not contradict me either. Since he was usually pleased
with my performances, I believe he had no objection to such an approach
to his music."

31) Fyodor Druzhinin Druzhinin, who joined the Beethoven
Quartet in 1964, shares the programmatic view of Shostakovich's
instrumental music proposed by Mravinsky, Milkis, and Kondrashin:
"People who lived in Shostakovich's epoch have no need to dig in the
archives or to marvel at the evidence of repressions and executions and
murders. It is all there in his music." (p. 390)

32) Mstislav Rostropovich Rostropovich has made numerous
statements in Western publications to the effect that Shostakovich was
the secret musical historian of the USSR but that the Soviet authorities
were too stupid to realise the extent of his musical campaign against
the Soviet regime.[54] Wilson quotes his
opinion on Testimony ("basically everything that is stated there
is true") (pp. 187-8) and his disclosure of the satirical presence of
Stalin's favourite tune, "Suliko", in Shostakovich's First Cello
Concerto (p. 323).

33) Galina Vishnevskaya Vishnevskaya describes how the
song-cycle Satires was given the sub-title Pictures of the
Past in order to disguise its relevance to the USSR in the time it
was written: "One of the poems was 'Our Posterity'. Though written in
1910, it had recently been published in the Soviet Union. Yet with the
music of Shostakovich it took on an entirely different meaning - it
became an indictment of the current Soviet regime and its insane
ideology." (p. 342) Vishnevskaya's autobiography[55] contains the most sustained portrait of
Shostakovich as an anti-communist outside the pages of
Testimony. Wilson does not quote Vishnevskaya's direct statements
on this subject, which are worth excerpting here:

"If in today's Russia
the human consciousness is being more and more liberated, a great share
of the credit must be given to Dmitri Shostakovich, who in his music,
from the beginning of his career to the end, called upon people to
protest against the coercion of the individual... An album called
'Shostakovich Speaks' and consisting of recordings of his public
statements was issued in the Soviet Union.[56] How the authorities hastened to cover up
the traces of the gradual murder of that great man! But they deluded
themselves if they thought that by presenting Shostakovich in their
package, by palming a Party card off on him, they had made him the very
image of a loyal communist. Those statements, which run counter to his
art and life, constitute nothing more than a damning document - a
searing testimony to the communist regime's perversion and
suppression of the individual... In his symphonies, those wordless
monologues, there is protest and tragedy, pain and humiliation. If music
can be called anti-communist, I think Shostakovich's music should be
called by that name."[57]

34) Edison Denisov Denisov quotes Shostakovich to the effect
that he was forced to write The Song of the Forests (p. 302) and
that prominent members of the Soviet government were tainted with blood
(p. 303). When, in 1962, Solzhenitsyn's novella of the Gulag One Day
in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in Novy Mir,
Shostakovich (p. 304) told Denisov that the book was "reality varnished
over; the truth was ten times worse than that", a view confirmed by the
publication of The Gulag Archipelago in the 1970s. Denisov
further confirms that Shostakovich's hatred of the Soviet regime was
morally, rather than politically, driven. For this reason, he became
ever more angry in old age over Soviet communism's systematic
dismantling of traditional morality and human decency: "Dmitri
Dmitriyevich always returned to one and the same theme: 'In my youth we
were brought up on the Ten Commandments: "Don't kill; Don't steal; Don't
commit adultery." But nowadays there exists only one commandment: "Don't
sully the purity of Marxist-Leninist teaching."'" (p. 433)

35) Nikolai Karetnikov Karetnikov corroborates Denisov's
claim of Shostakovich's preoccupation with the destruction of
traditional moral values under communist rule. Shostakovich asked
Karetnikov about a film which everyone was talking about. Karetnikov
replied that he did not think the film would interest Shostakovich,
since "the moral truths propounded in the film do not transcend the
boundaries of what our mothers taught us in childhood: 'Don't steal,
don't lie, respect your elders...'". Shostakovich replied: "But that's
wonderful! That's wonderful! Indeed now, so to speak, now has come the
time, the time when, so to speak, such things are necessary, these
things should be constantly repeated. It must be a wonderful, so to
speak, wonderful film. I'll definitely go, so to speak, I'll definitely
go to see it." (pp. 308-9)

36) Grigori Kozintsev "Music is not a profession for
Shostakovich, it is the necessity to speak out and to convey what lies
behind the lives of people, to depict our age and our country... In
Shostakovich's music I hear a virulent hatred of cruelty, of the cult of
power, of the persecution of truth..." (pp. 374, 371)

For the Prosecution

A) Lev Arnshtam Arnshtam was a lifelong close friend of
Shostakovich and is therefore vanishingly unlikely to have dissented
from the view of the composer as an anti-communist put forward by the
aforegoing 36 witnesses. Unfortunately, Elizabeth Wilson includes an
article "by" Arnshtam, collected in 1976 for a Soviet anthology,[58] which contains statements that suggest
the teenage Shostakovich was enthusiastic for communism, including the
claim that the composer's rhythmic sense was "forged by the rhythm and
pace of the Revolution" (p. 23). This phrase is (a) a standard cliché of
Soviet officialese based on Proletkult ideas about "rhythms" and
"tempos" of production, (b) a meaningless statement in itself, and (c)
contradicted by the testimonies of Zoya Shostakovich and Boris Lossky.

As for the article's further claim that the composer "did not notice
deprivation" because his "conscious awakening in life coincided with the
Revolution", this is extensively contradicted in Shostakovich's own
words in his letters to Tatyana Glivenko (1923-31), where his illnesses,
depressions, and suicidal impulses bulk large while references to the
Revolution are virtually non-existent. If Arnshtam did any more than add
his signature to this nonsense, he may have interjected the ambiguous
words "coincided with" in the above phrase. Sadly, he died in 1980, so
Wilson had no opportunity to ask him whether or not he would have
consented to this article appearing in her book. For these reasons,
Arnshtam cannot be counted as a serious witness for a prosecution case
against Shostakovich.

B) Daniil Zhitomirsky Zhitomirsky believed Shostakovich's
Second Symphony to have been shaped by a genuine attempt "to glorify the
October Revolution" (p. 72); he also criticised Lady Macbeth for
not being free of the "propaganda tendencies of the 1920s" (p. 95). The
first of these opinions is, on the face of it, demolished by
Shostakovich's established contempt for Bezymensky's poem for the
symphony (see above: 8. Tatyana Glivenko and 9. Nikolai Malko) and his
own lackadaisical attitude to the composition of the work.[59] The second of Zhitomirsky's opinions is
unreconcilable with Shostakovich's lifelong regard for Lady
Macbeth, which remained centrally important to him. Were such
"propaganda tendencies" present in the opera, it would be reasonable to
expect him to have stood by these only if he had been a lifelong
communist, which he was not. As for the details adduced by Zhitomirsky,
it should be pointed out that the end for which these were introduced
into the libretti was arguably to satirise Soviet life. In other
respects, Zhitomirsky, a friend of Shostakovich from the war years, must
be counted among witnesses for the defence, as Wilson's remaining
excerpts show (e.g., pp. 176-8, 328-9). That Daniil Zhitomirsky regarded
Shostakovich as unequivocally anti-communist from the mid-1930s is clear
from his extensive essay in Daugava.[60]

C) Andrei Balanchivadze Balanchivadze, a Georgian composer
and brother of George Balanchine, befriended Shostakovich in 1927. It
was at Balanchivadze's home in Tbilisi that Shostakovich finished the
second act of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1932 and, when the opera
was attacked in 1936, Balanchivadze came to his aid with a deposition
(p. 80) concerning Shostakovich's alleged theories on "musical
ideology". According to Balanchivadze, Shostakovich wrote to him "often"
during the period of the Cultural Revolution. In one such letter, from
which Balanchivadze presumably quotes, Shostakovich speaks of ideology
as defined by attitude. In Marxist-Leninist terms, this contention is,
of course, heretical. (Ideology, while undoubtedly born from attitude,
is nonetheless an objective entity independent of attitude thereafter.)

What Balanchivadze seems to have intended by quoting this letter is to
depict Shostakovich as a serious-minded cogitator on ideological issues,
as opposed to the irresponsible perpetrator of musical "muddles"
portrayed in the Pravda attacks. In the letter, Shostakovich
begins with a comparison between the approaches of his hero Gogol and
the "proletarian" RAPP playwright Alexander Afinogenov. He takes the
comparison no further; apparently Balanchivadze is to know what is
meant. Instead, Shostakovich proposes a contrast between two composers,
Ivanov and Petrov (Smith and Jones), who each write a piece on the theme
of "the Factory". Ivanov, with "the greatest professionalism", ends up
merely imitating the rhythms and sounds of the machinery. (Shostakovich
may have had in mind Alexander Mosolov's then internationally notorious
Zavod [Factory].) Petrov, a more perspicacious fellow, hears
these noises but sees something else: "He notices the pathos of
socialist labour, the enthusiasm and dynamic energy of the working
class, its tragedy in relation to its failures and its joys at its
success in the overfulfilling of the Plan." This sentence, which is a
sequence of contemporary propaganda clichés ostensibly copied from the
front page of Pravda, is retailed with a straight face as if the
author believes in it - precisely as similar passages of Soviet
propaganda clichés are presented in Shostakovich's letters to Isaak
Glikman.[61] (As Flora Litvinova points
out, "he excelled at parodying the bureaucratic lingo".)[62]

The letter pivots on the Aesopian
question and answer: "Which of them is closest [sic] to us? Clearly,
Petrov." In fact, clearly neither the Mosolovian constructivist nor the
pathos-seeking proletarian are "closest" either to Shostakovich or to
Balanchivadze (who went on to become an admired symphonist in the
colourful nationalist style of his Armenian colleague Aram
Khachaturian). If anyone in these examples is "close" to Shostakovich,
it is Gogol. Balanchivadze presumably hoped that Shostakovich's
conclusion ("it is the attitude of the composer to a particular subject
that defines his ideology") either sounded virtuous enough to deflect
his attackers or was, as it was surely meant to be, ambiguous enough to
throw them off the scent whilst indicating a more subversive
interpretation. In any event, the statements about "ideology" in this
letter cannot be seriously cited as evidence for the prosecution.

Why,
though, would Shostakovich write Aesopically to Balanchivadze? For the
same reason that he wrote in this way to Glikman: in case his mail was
interdicted by the NKVD. But there is an additional reason. During the
Cultural Revolution, when this letter was written, both composers were
working for TRAM in their respective cities in order to obtain shelter
from the Leftist attacks of RAPM. Since TRAM was also a left-wing
organisation (merely a less oppressively censorious one), anyone working
under its auspices would have had to present a degree of conformist
appearance. Writing as one TRAM composer to another, it would only have
been prudent for Shostakovich to have employed publicly accepted forms
of political discourse of the sort found in this letter. In the
testimony of no other witness in Wilson's book does Shostakovich
animadvert on ideology, which, to go by majority opinion, held no
interest for him.

In other words, none of the three ostensible "witnesses for the
prosecution" adduced from Elizabeth Wilson's book are, in truth,
anything of the sort. In fact there are no witnesses for the prosecution
at all in Shostakovich: A Life Remembered. All of the witnesses
in this book are either sympathetically "neutral" or plainly for the
defence.

Summary

On its own, Elizabeth Wilson's book totally destroys the assumption of
communist orthodoxy upon which the Naive Approach is constructed.
Consequently the Naive Approach must be deemed obsolete, notwithstanding
that writers like Christopher Norris and Robert Matthew-Walker doggedly
and dishonestly continue to propound it.[63]

If the Naive Approach is a dead duck, the
attacking brand of anti-revisionism I have characterised as the
"collaborator model" continues to show signs of what, in certain
departments of Western academia, passes for life. Yet the testimonies
for the defence given here are equally fatal to any idea that
Shostakovich acquiesced to the demands of the Soviet regime out of
anything but fear for himself and his family, and under extreme duress.
If such acquiescence can be called "collaboration", then the whole of
Russia must be said to have been in a state of collaboration with the
Soviet regime. Indeed, if mere acquiescence (let alone acquiescence
under duress) is to be the criterion for collaboration, every citizen in
every democracy who does not actively campaign against whichever party
happens to be in power at a given time is a "collaborator" with that
party.

If one is to play fast and loose with language, such a contention
may seem acceptable; however, by the standard of those fascists and
anti-semites in Nazi-occupied countries who enthusiastically co-operated
with the Nazi authorities to betray or persecute their fellow
countryfolk, such "collaboration" is so mild that it is plainly absurd
to stretch the term to cover both kinds of behaviour. If Shostakovich
can be shown to have betrayed and persecuted like this, either out of
conviction or a wish to save his own life at the expense of others, then
he may truly be called a collaborator. But there is no evidence at all
that he betrayed or persecuted, while the idea that he held serious
political convictions (in this case, in the ideology of Soviet
communism) is, to go by the witnesses quoted in Elizabeth Wilson's book,
simply out of the question.

In any case, the reality of conditions in
the USSR was far subtler than anti-revisionism conceives. Many people of
impeccable moral character (such as Vladimir Ashkenazy)[64] found themselves coerced by the KGB into
offering information about their fellow citizens, and faced horribly
difficult ethical problems as a result, striving not to comply with such
requirements whilst at the same time maintaining an appearance of
loyalty. Persecuted as he was, Shostakovich never had to confront such
direct dilemmas (although we can confidently expect that he would have
met them with the same "virtuously duplicitous" evasions resorted to by,
for example, Ashkenazy).

Likewise, many people in the USSR carried Party
cards merely as a disguise and a protection, believing in no part of the
ideology which notionally came attached to such documents. (Kirill
Kondrashin was once such.) Without an admixture of betrayal or
persecution, this sort of pragmatism could only be termed "collaboration"
by someone unacquainted with the practical dynamics of living in a
totalitarian state. Even those unfortunate people - and there were
thousands upon thousands in the USSR - who did betray their fellow
citizens (and their loved ones) under duress of various kinds, can only
be accused of collaboration if all extenuating circumstances are
mercilessly disregarded.

Actively believing or venally self-seeking
collaboration of the sort seen in Nazi-occupied Europe did exist in the
USSR, but it is a very far cry from anything perpetrated by the average
citizen and certainly nothing remotely close to what we know
Shostakovich to have done in the way of signing petitions without
reading them or dutifully composing ridiculous works for Soviet state
occasions. Indeed, the numerous stories of Shostakovich risking his life
to aid Soviet-persecuted friends and colleagues run so sharply counter
to anti-revisionist insinuations of collaboration that it is shameful
that such insinuations have not been publicly withdrawn and apologised
for. (Nor can the key anti-revisionist charge that Shostakovich
collaborated by joining the Party in 1960 be seriously maintained after
the publication of Shostakovich: A Life Remembered. As for the
four alleged witnesses for the prosecution advanced by Malcolm Brown in
support of this charge, not one of their testimonies survives the
scrutiny of logic or contrary evidence.[65])

To the 36 "witnesses for the defence" herein adduced from the pages of
Elizabeth Wilson's book may, at present, be added at least 17 others,
including Shostakovich's son Maxim, daughter Galina, third wife Irina[66], Vladimir Ashkenazy, Rudolf Barshai,
Andrei Bitov, Semyon Bychkov, Rostislav Dubinsky, Emil Gilels, Ilya
Musin, Sviatoslav Richter, Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, Kurt Sanderling,
Rodion Shchedrin, Yuri Temirkanov, Vera Volkova, and Yevgeny
Yevtushenko. Nor do these include all of those to have gone on record as
endorsing Testimony (around 30 witnesses to date) or Boris
Tishchenko who (despite his by no means unreproachable criticism of
Testimony) is known to share the prevailing view of Shostakovich
as a moral anti-communist and secret dissident.

To this must be added
the damning fact that there is no credible witness - not one! - to the
contrary. (Tikhon Khrennikov is obviously excluded by definition.) I
have demolished Fay's slurs on Shostakovich's motives for writing
From Jewish Folk Poetry. (Since she has made no reply to my
criticisms, the reasonable presumption must be that she has no reply to
make.) I have likewise demolished Taruskin's theory on Shostakovich's
motives for writing Lady Macbeth and his contentions concerning
the official Soviet reception of the Fifth Symphony. (Since he has made
no reply to my criticisms, the reasonable presumption must be that he
has no reply to make.) Allan Ho and Dmitry Feofanov have demolished the
anti-revisionist case against Testimony. There would seem, then,
to be little left of the existing anti-revisionist position at the time
of writing, though new attacks may yet develop.

At the root of the risible failure of anti-revisionists to come up with a
single witness or a single sustainable argument to support
their insinuations is a basic lack of interest in the Soviet background
which, in turn, confers a basic ignorance of it. Whenever a new source
turns up, they seem to skip lightly over the socio-historical aspects
and alight on whatever musical details such a source may contain,
however trivial. For example, David Fanning, in reviewing Elizabeth
Wilson's book on BBC Radio 3, made no mention at all of its copious
evidence of the political arm-twisting inflicted upon Shostakovich, let
alone of the overwhelming testimony to his anti-communism, seizing
instead on Edison Denisov's claim (pp. 301-2) that, during a fallow
interlude, Shostakovich kept himself occupied by orchestrating (and then
discarding) all of Rimsky-Korsakov's songs. Fanning found this to be
suspicious, but not because he doubted that Shostakovich could ever have
needed to block out the world quite so determinedly; rather, because of
the quantity of Rimsky's songs! It is this loftily superficial response
to the whole subject of Shostakovich's life and work which lies behind
the anti-revisionists' ignominious failure to come to grips with the
background adequately enough to support their preposterous contentions.

Worse than mere superficiality, however, is the openly expressed
indifference of Laurel Fay. Speaking at a meeting of the American
Musicological Society in New York, on 3rd November 1995, Fay admitted
that she deliberately pays no attention to the testimonies of
Shostakovich's family and friends (i.e., the entire contents of her
friend Elizabeth Wilson's book!) on the grounds that she considers these
testimonies to be unreliable. She gave no evidence to support this
contention but added that she "didn't want to become compromised by
having them [such witnesses] tell me their stories and then being
obliged somehow to retell them". [67] In
other words, Fay ignores all 36 of the individual testimonies to
Shostakovich's attitudes and motives quoted in this article - and,
implicitly, the 17 others listed here. To her, the opinions of over 50
people who knew Shostakovich count for less than a demonstrably [68] bogus Soviet "toast" to "equality and
mutual respect for the ethnic cultures of all the Soviet Union's
constituent nationalities" printed on a front page of Pravda in
1948! Even a complete novice in this subject would know enough not to
expect to derive an accurate, let alone an adequate, impression of it
from reading Pravda. By taking her view of Soviet history from
that tawdry propaganda rag, Fay turns herself into a scholastic
laughing-stock. By cavalierly dismissing the testimonies of
Shostakovich's family and friends, she disqualifies herself from
consideration as a serious authority on his music. Her stance and
conduct in this affair can only be called outrageous.

The attitudes of Richard Taruskin and Malcolm Hamrick Brown to the
testimony of our "witnesses for the defence" are scarcely less
defensible. The latter's claim that "it doesn't really matter how many
ex-Soviets believe that Testimony is 'essentially accurate'" [69] is merely an echo of Fay's dismissive
complacency. As for Taruskin, he seems either not to have read Wilson's
book with close attention, or to have decided to ignore everything in it
which does not conform to his prejudices, or simply to have farcically
failed to understand any of it. For their persistent misinterpretations,
misrepresentations and outright falsifications, these anti-revisionists
deserve only history's contempt and, unless they soon mend their ways,
that is what they will get.